


Damage Beyond Repair

by bauble



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-12 11:36:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12958356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bauble/pseuds/bauble
Summary: Written for ae_ldws. The prompt: locked out.





	Damage Beyond Repair

The thing about torture is: it doesn't work.

Not for information gathering, anyway. Using it to create fear and suffering is, however, entirely effective.

Arthur knows this because he's tortured six different people in four months. He asked every one of them the same set of questions: where is Eames? What did you do to him? Do you know who I am?

He already had the answers, of course. None of them have new information to offer. But it's interesting, all the same, to see how the attitudes shift from defiant (condition: verbal interrogation) to angry (condition: threats of violence) to fearful (condition: violence) to desperate (condition: prolonged violence with no hope of escape). By the end, all are reduced to begging interspersed with truth, lies—whatever they think Arthur wants to hear. Anything to make it stop.

Arthur isn't a sadist; he doesn't get off on cutting people's body parts away. It does help abate, momentarily, the wild, incandescent fury that consumes him when he thinks of Eames lying in a pool of his own blood, barely breathing—

They all expire, some sooner than others. Whether due to blood loss, heart attack, or suicide, the end is always anticlimactic. Arthur's left with meat to dispose of, a room and instruments to sterilize.

It takes a year to hunt his last target, the one who hired the team that extracted from Eames' militarized mind and left nothing but a smoking crater behind. Killing the man who set all of this chaos in motion should feel like a victory.

But even after every one of the targets is dead, Eames doesn't move, doesn't wake. In dreams, Eames' mind is an impenetrable abyss, a wasteland that rejects Arthur's attempts to order it.

And Arthur is left feeling nothing at all.

fin


End file.
